The annual budget review has long been a kind of theater on Madison Avenue and in corporate marketing departments everywhere, with each discipline arriving prepared to justify its existence in the language finance people understand. Paid media brings its return on ad spend. Customer acquisition teams bring their cost-per-lead calculations. And community marketing, for years, has brought enthusiasm.
This asymmetry has not gone unnoticed by the people who write the checks.
Kourtney Barnes, the vice president of marketing at Bettermode, a community platform company, is among those arguing that the soft metrics traditionally used to measure community efforts — active users, comment threads, the occasional heartwarming testimonial — are no longer sufficient to survive budget season. She proposes instead a dedicated financial framework she calls "return on community spend," or ROCS, which would track community marketing's contribution to deal velocity and customer retention in terms a chief financial officer might actually respect.
"When a program is evaluated strictly through qualitative, feel-good indicators, it inevitably gets categorized as a corporate nice-to-have rather than a business driver," Ms. Barnes writes. (One imagines the community managers nodding vigorously while updating their résumés.)
The argument arrives at a moment when the economics of customer acquisition have grown notably less favorable. Paid media costs continue their upward march, and the rise of artificial intelligence search tools that deliver answers without clicks has made rented distribution channels feel increasingly precarious. A branded community, Ms. Barnes suggests, offers something owned — a place where peer recommendations accumulate like compound interest.
Whether chief financial officers will embrace yet another acronym remains to be seen. But the underlying tension Ms. Barnes identifies is real enough: In an industry that has spent decades trying to prove that intangible things have tangible value, community marketing may simply be the latest discipline to discover that faith alone does not survive the quarterly review.
Original story published in Fast Company: "Why community marketing deserves its own return metric"